Micron, the Boise, Idaho-based memory chip maker, has captured Wall Street’s heart. Whether the love affair endures will heavily depend on how long the AI-driven supply crunch for memory chips lasts.

Micron promises that it has shored up its position for the long term, which would allow it to withstand a sudden drop in demand or overcapacity of supply. And Wall Street has become a believer, helping Micron briefly surpass the market valuation of Meta and Tesla for the first time on Thursday, though it floated back down by Friday to nearly match them.

Specifically Micron closed Friday’s trading with a market cap close to $1.27 trillion, while Meta was at $1.39 trillion and Tesla was at $1.42 trillion. Micron’s stock has soared over 236% in the past month alone, closing Friday at $1,132 a share. In comparison, it spent years upon years before mid-2025 at below $100 a share.

It’s a dizzying rise for a company that most consumers associated with the tiny memory cards that, back in the day, were commonly needed to boost PCs, smartphones, or other device storage.

Wall Street isn’t sweating over that product line. Micron is benefiting from the AI data center buildout boom that has created a shortage of system memory chips, both DRAM and NAND, which Micron makes, particularly High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM). A single AI server requires magnitudes more memory than a laptop.

AI system makers like Nvidia, as well as the hyperscalers building their own systems, are buying up large quantities of memory, such as Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Google, Meta and Oracle. This is forcing all the other companies who need memory to hoard it as well, from PC makers like Dell and HP, to other kinds of device makers.

This lack of supply, which has been dubbed RAMageddon, is predicted to persist into 2027. And it’s already driving up the price of consumer electronics like Apple products and Xbox consoles.

With the whole tech industry clamoring for more memory, Micron’s delivered blockbuster third-quarter earnings last week. Revenue quadrupled year-over-year to $41.45 billion, and profits skyrocketed from $1.88 billion to $28.2 billion over the same period. Micron also provided a positive outlook, forecasting fourth-quarter revenue of between $49 billion and $51 billion.

And Wall Street, which has been eager to find more public AI-related companies that may do as well as Nvidia, became even more enamored.

The historic problem for memory chip makers like Micron and Samsung is that building out manufacturing facilities to increase capacity is a time-consuming, expensive endeavor. And demand often falls just as companies can increase capacity, creating a glut and subsequent price drop.

Micron got ahead of any AI bust chatter by emphasizing a series of long-term supply agreements, including with Nvidia and AI lab Anthropic, that would presumably protect it. The company said in its earnings presentation that it has signed 16 strategic customer agreements across the data center, consumer, and auto market segments, which it expects to fundamentally transform its business model.

That seemed to convince a number of analysts that this company could be another long-term, profitable investment. In a research note, William Blair tech analyst Sebastien Naji noted demand growth continues to outpace the rate that new cleanroom space can come online.

“Given the strong likelihood of continued ASP growth in the coming quarters and improving revenue visibility thanks to a rapidly expanding set of long-term agreements (SCAs) with key customers, we see potential for more durable earnings growth and reiterate our Outperform rating,” Naji wrote.

Whether Micron really can sustain itself for long-term without a bust cycle remains to be seen. But for a brief moment on Thursday, this U.S. company was more valuable than some of the industry’s giants.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part. To get this in your inbox, sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility!

A quick heads-up to readers: I will not publish an issue next week due to the July 4th holiday. I will see you all the following week. 

A series of stories this week highlight the continued — and apparently growing — scrutiny of Tesla’s automated driving system known as Full Self-Driving (Supervised). A fatal crash involving a Tesla that struck a home in Texas and killed a 76-year-old woman gained national attention after the driver told police that Autopilot — the company’s basic driver-assistance system, which has since been discontinued — was engaged at the time of the crash. 

Ashok Elluswamy, vice president of AI software at Tesla, shared a different account of the crash, claiming on X that the driver manually overrode “self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area.”

His comments suggest the vehicle was equipped with FSD (Supervised), and not Autopilot, but without an independent investigation we don’t know for sure. But we might, eventually. 

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) have now opened investigations into the crash.

Meanwhile, Tesla settled a lawsuit connected to a fatal 2023 crash involving a vehicle using FSD (Supervised). This crash is part of a different NHTSA investigation into Tesla FSD focused on whether the system could “detect and respond appropriately to reduced roadway visibility conditions,” such as “sun glare, fog, or airborne dust.”

All of this attention comes as Tesla positions itself as an AI and robotics company. FSD (Supervised) is currently the most visible, revenue-generating product tied to that branding.

A little bird

A reader who has shared tips with us before alerted me to a research report on Waymo and its growing fleet of Ojai robotaxis. For a refresher, Waymo struck a supplier deal with Zeekr, the brand owned by China’s Geely Holding Group, to provide it with an electric vehicle designed to operate as a robotaxi.

The minivan-like robotaxi was designed in Sweden and is manufactured in China. (These vehicles don’t contain any vehicle communication modules; current U.S. policy bans Chinese-connected vehicle technology.) Once it gets to the U.S., Waymo takes over and adds in its self-driving system. The Ojai is equipped with Waymo’s sixth-generation system — including 13 cameras, four lidar sensors, six radar units, and an array of external audio receivers.

The New York-based research firm MoffettNathanson did a bit of gumshoeing to figure out how serious Waymo’s Ojai program is. The firm examined Bill of Lading documents, which are detailed receipts of shipped goods that are filed with the U.S. government. The company counted Zeekr vehicle labels CM1e or CME, the company’s label for Waymo-bound vehicles. 

MoffettNathanson, which shared its report with TechCrunch, discovered that Waymo is on pace to import 3,156 vehicles into the U.S. this year, about 300 vehicles per month.

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com.

Deals!

Aseon Labs, a Silicon Valley startup developing mobile pods that can autonomously inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis, raised $10 million in a seed round led by Crane Venture Partners. Other participants included Y Combinator, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s venture firm Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, and Founders Capital.

CaoCao and May Mobility, an autonomous vehicle technology startup, partnered to jointly explore commercializing robotaxi services in international markets, beginning with Europe.

Elroy Air, the autonomous heavy-cargo ‌drone startup, plans to go public through a merger with blank-check firm ​Columbus Circle Capital Corp II. The deal is valued at about $1 billion.

Partly, a company that creates AI tools for the automotive repair supply chain, raised $50 million in a Series B round led by DST Global Partners.

Spiro, an African electric vehicle and clean energy infrastructure platform, finalized a $55 million investment from NewTrails Capital, a Chinese growth-stage fund. 

Terawatt Infrastructure, a company that provides EV charging for fleets, including for Waymo and other autonomous and electric fleets, set up a five-year senior secured credit facility that could allow it to borrow as much as $300 million from banks. The proceeds will support the acquisition and development of charging depots, the company said. 

Notable reads and other tidbits

Companies like Tesla and Zoox could get a boost from the U.S. Department of Transportation, which has proposed changes to federal vehicle regulations that would allow companies to skip the inclusion of brake pedals in “vehicles designed to be driven exclusively by automated driving systems.” 

Lucid Motors is laying off 18% of its workforce, or around 1,500 employees, and cutting the second shift of EV production at its factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. Reminder: The layoffs come just four months after the EV maker cut 12% of its staff. CEO Silvio Napoli said the cuts are part of an effort “to simplify the company, sharpen execution, and position Lucid to become more competitive over time.” In this pursuit to simplify, what will Lucid give up? 

Lyft CEO David Risher posted a blog that got my attention. In it, he laid out the company’s multi-sensor safety standard for autonomous rides. The upshot: Autonomous vehicles that use one type of sensor can’t go on the Lyft network. I reached out to the company and they confirmed what this seemed to imply — vehicles like the Tesla Cybercab and Tesla robotaxis that use FSD (Unsupervised) won’t qualify since they only use cameras. The rules don’t apply to advanced driver-assistance systems, by the way. So all of those humans who drive Tesla vehicles on the Lyft app are not affected.

OpenAI hired away Uber India president Prabhjeet Singh to be its first managing director.

Polestar, the Swedish electric vehicle manufacturer owned by Chinese automotive giant Geely, can no longer sell its new cars in the U.S. market. The imported vehicles are restricted by a U.S. government law that bans Chinese connected car technology. 

Samsara, the fleet management company, is rolling out business-card-sized sticky tracking labels to solve cargo theft. 

Slate Auto’s radically simple electric truck starts at $24,950. Would you pay $25K for a two-seater truck with a 205-mile range, hand-crank windows, no infotainment system, and gray composite material finish (owners can order customizable wraps for the vehicle)? And climate tech reporter and in-house battery expert Tim De Chant explains why Slate changed the battery in its cheap EV truck. 

Uber is facing a lawsuit by shareholders that accuse the board and management of putting profits ahead of compliance and safety, decisions that have exposed the company and its shareholders to risk.

Waymo has set up an entity in Germany, which German news outlet Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung first reported. The company registration filing makes it pretty clear that it’s gearing up to launch a robotaxi service in the country. However, this doesn’t mean it’s imminent, insiders tell me. Meanwhile, Waymo has dropped its waitlist in Nashville, a move that opens up its service to the public. 

Zoox gave its custom-built robotaxis a makeover as it prepares for commercial service and larger-scale production at its Hayward, California, facility.

Has Silicon Valley been building the wrong things?

Despite its self help-y title, writer/designer/academic Ian Bogost’s forthcoming book “The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life” asks some pointed questions about how technology has transformed our experience of the physical world. Using Bogost’s popular article in the Atlantic about the decline of stick shift cars as a springboard, “The Small Stuff” argues that many aspects of our daily existence — from cars to doors to bathrooms — have become dematerialized.

“Basically, it’s the idea that we’ve become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happened is what you might call convenience technologies,” Bogost told me, though he was quick to add that technology isn’t the only thing driving this change. “All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have stripped away the texture of everyday life.”

In fact, while Bogost nodded to other books criticizing the tech industry, he said he’s become “a little bored with the constant critique.” So he’s currently less focused on calling for broad societal change and more on finding “gratification” in everyday sensory experiences. 

“It’s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, ‘Well, we just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we’ll be able to get back to experiencing our lives fully,’” he said. “Ordinary people don’t need to wait for that.”

During our interview (which I’ve edited for length and clarity), we also discussed the tradeoff between convenience and experience, how Silicon Valley can do better, and the “hipster reclamation of nostalgia.”

You wrote this great piece about the stick shift. How did that lead you to these bigger ideas about “the small stuff”? How did you realize there was a book in this?

I did the stick shift story in 2022. At a high level, it was: People have been lamenting the decline of the stick shift for years and years, but electric vehicles made it real, because they don’t have transmissions. Assuming that EVs are going to eventually become universally adopted, which I think is the case, then this really is the end.

You [write] a story and you’re like, “Well, that was fun, it’s a nice little thing, I’ll put it out on the internet.” That one was just huge. The response was enormous. And I was really interested in why. Is it just that people really love their stick shift cars? I didn’t think so.

I took a year of thinking about it, off-and-on [and] I realized, actually, I’ve been working on this for longer than I expected. I went back and looked at writing about toasters and writing about smoothies or slushies, or my catalog of interests, and the things that I’ve been doing. I just find ordinary life very, very alluring, and I’ve never understood quite why. Is there something wrong with me? Am I just a weirdo? 

It was a realization, through the stick shift, that ordinary life is not just interesting, but deeply, deeply meaningful, and we have undervalued it. Something like the stick shift, which is imbued with symbolic and real meaning for people, it just opens a window, and you feel the breeze come in, and you’re like, “Oh yes, the breeze.”

Let’s talk about the concept of dematerialization, because the book is structured around it. The first half is describing, diagnosing, and then [the second half talks] about solutions, antidotes. Do you want to explain what dematerialization is? 

Basically, it’s the idea that we’ve become disconnected from the sensory world, and the reason that happened is what you might call convenience technologies. Although it’s not just technologies; it’s also bureaucracy, it’s efficiency, it’s economics, it’s regulatory apparatuses. All sorts of factors — not just tech, and certainly not just Silicon Valley-style technology — have distanced people from the world that they inhabit, they have stripped away the texture of everyday life. 

My favorite example of this, the one that people seem to always get, is: You go to the airport restroom, you just got off your flight, and the toilet flushes for you, the sink turns on for you, the towels dispense for you, the soap dispenses for you — or it doesn’t, right? It kind of doesn’t work, but that sense of: This thing that I used to do with my physical body and my senses, now I don’t do that anymore. That is so commonplace, and it’s, broadly speaking, been driven by things that have really benefited our lives. But we didn’t realize that we were making a tradeoff between progress and giving up that contact with the material world.

So that’s what dematerialization names for me, this family of conditions that distanced us from our sensory lives.

That section about the restroom was really visceral for me, because you’re not just talking about the experience of using these things, but it’s the experience of having them not work for you.

You notice them when they don’t work, and there’s some friction there that helps you see the problem. In a lot of cases, we don’t even realize there’s a problem, or we realize something’s wrong, but we don’t know what it is.

One of the things you also point out is: A lot of these changes have, in some ways, improved our lives. You said there’s a tradeoff, like in the case of the stick shift and automatic, and then you add electric vehicles — 

There’s a lot of folks out there who’ve advocated for stick shift cars who are also like, “Internal combustion engines are the only way, and we have to be purists about burning dinosaurs.” 

I don’t feel that way at all. Hailing an Uber and streaming music and getting DoorDash and even some of the promises of the automated fixtures — I mean, some of them are bunk, but I get it, broadly — I think it’s really important to me that we recognize that our lives are better overall, but there was this thing that happened that we didn’t notice, in a frog boiling kind of way.

I’m a big fan of Cory Doctorow, but these [arguments that,] “This system of economics and technological value systems are obviously the cause of all our problems, and I’m going to name it enshittification,” just to pick a very popular example. People clearly want an explanation, but then you’re like, “Yeah, but I like Amazon Prime, I like to be able to search Google for information.”

So I’m trying to toe this line between being honest about the fact that our lives are broadly speaking better, that this is not a Silicon Valley thing, actually, it’s much bigger than that, and that it happens so slowly that we didn’t notice.

One of the striking things to me about the book versus what I’ve read of Doctorow’s work, or [Jenny Odell’s book] “How to do Nothing” — there’s a whole cluster of books — is that your book is less angry. There’s a strain of criticism, but it’s not quite the same tone.

Personally, I’ve been writing about technology for a long, long time, and I don’t think it’s haughty of me to say I was ahead of the curve in being critical of Silicon Valley-style technological advancement. I was out there talking about Facebook and social media way, way, way before a lot of people were concerned, and that felt very lonely.

But I just feel a little a little bored with the constant critique, and I also feel like it’s misdiagnosing or overdiagnosing the problem. It’s very satisfying to believe that there are good guys and bad guys, or that there’s a simple explanation, and once we understand the explanation we just need to unwind it and then everything will be good again.

I want to talk about the Silicon Valley part of it. And this isn’t just a Silicon Valley thing, but a lot of the ideas that you’re talking about resonate with this sense that a lot of consumer tech products, consumer services are focused on convenience, speed, those kinds of things. Reading this book, and related books, sometimes I have this sense of: Are all these companies just pursuing the wrong goals?

I certainly think that the obsession with efficiency, automation, invisibility, transparency, and scale does drive that desire. “We are going to make everything easier to do, so you don’t have to do it.” That’s one way of summarizing the last however many years.

Some of that drive came from the right place, like Uber. Remember before Uber, when you were in a city that wasn’t New York, and you wanted to get a cab, and it was really hard, and now it’s really easy? You could romanticize that and say that [convenience] doesn’t matter, but it does.

Rather than blame either technologization, or industry, or ordinary people for being too stupid to notice or handing over their lives willingly, which is another explanation, I just think it happened over such a long period, so slowly, and with such overall endorsement, that both consumers and the organizations that provide these kinds of services were saying, “Here’s the deal,” and everyone was like, “Yeah, I’m on board, I don’t want to buy CDs anymore, Spotify would be amazing, sign me up.”

Actually, we felt like we understood the deal, but we didn’t fully understand the deal. We did not fully account for the fact that we are physical beings, we are embodied beings, and that is maybe somewhere where I’d put some of the blame more squarely on Silicon Valley-style culture. You see it today, this idea that I can rise above even having a body, I can live forever — whether transhumanism, singularitarianism, or just eternal life through efficiency and optimization, that idea has always been central to the general purpose computer, that it can sieve through any kind of experience and turn it into a computational one.

And we are just never, thank God, we are not able to exit our bodies. But you go to the Valley and there’s still this weird sense that that embodied human experience is not needed, unnecessary. And that’s just wrong.

The book is written for a broader audience, but I’m curious for entrepreneurs or people building products: Are there positive examples you’ve seen of how people can think about that tradeoff differently? So it’s not just optimizing purely for convenience, but maybe finding a balance between convenience and friction and sensory experience?

If you go back and you look at how computers turned from data analysis tools into cultural tools, which begins in the 1960s, really, there was this strong idea that you were going to be able to express yourself with [computers], but also that connecting to them in a human way was really important. And in the 1970s, at Xerox PARC and at Apple, there was this strong idea of a computational version of human factors engineering, of the fact that my body has to fit in the chair or has to go through the doorway, that was really, deeply important to computing for decades, until the ‘90s. Once we got to the 2000s, as the real takeover of culture by computation happened, I think that’s when we turned away from that process of trying to negotiate between computing and people. 

What that suggests is that the experience of doing something is also important, not just the outcome. We got massively focused on the outcome, and then we de-emphasize the experience of doing things, and now we’re at the point where, if you talk about the experience of doing something with the bogeyman Silicon Valley-style entrepreneur, they’ll be like, “Why would you bother? We can automate that. AI is going to solve that. We can hand that off to the Philippines.”

There’s all sorts of solutions that will prevent you from having to be bothered with doing that experiential thing, and it turns out: No, I want to have those experiences, because that’s part of what makes me human and alive, even though they feel ridiculous individually. You know, who cares about the sensation of the ice in my water bottle, but as I argue in the book, over time, all that little stuff, it adds up, it’s deeply meaningful, and when you strip it all away, you really notice what’s missing. 

The top line answer is: The experience matters. The experience of using products and services matters, not just the outcomes that they provide. And it almost feels funny to say it out loud in response to your question, because I think if you asked any UX designer in Silicon Valley, “Do you do that?” They’d be like, “Absolutely, we’re doing that all the time, that’s highly valuable to us.”

But I don’t think they are. They think they’re doing it, but have lost sight of what they’re really doing, which is stripping it away.

I love that the book is so rooted in personal experience and in sensory experience. But as someone who’s 43 and had a lot of these feelings, I start to get a little suspicious of myself. Am I just an old fart longing for [the experiences of my youth]? How do you think about these things in a way that’s not just about romanticizing the way things were?

It is very, very easy to slip into nostalgia, and I think there’s a current strain of desire that’s oriented toward so-called analog culture. Like, “I’m gonna get a Walkman again and that’s going to solve my problems.”

I have a few thoughts about it. First, I make this argument pretty clearly in the book: We’re not going back. You live in the present, into the future, and we don’t live in the past. Lamenting what came before and has been lost is useful insofar as it can orient you, but it’s not really useful in helping you live your life.

I love, love, love the telephone, I love the old-school Western Electric-style handset, I love how intimate they are, I love how they feel in my hand, I love the heft of it. [But now] we’re on Zoom, or at best we’re on our headphones. That’s not going to change. And so instead of looking at that example and going, “Ah, if only we could go back and we can maybe through this hipster reclamation of nostalgia“ — okay, that’s an interesting signal. I remember that, and that was meaningful to me, and a good way to orient yourself toward your actual sensory life.

Now, the great thing is that, whether you’re 43, or whether you’re 23, you still have a human body. You live in the world, and we live in it together, and so all around us, all the time, are opportunities to do the same kind of thing but in a different way. 

One of the things I love about Zoom over the telephone is, I can have this radio experience with myself and with you, that it’s very sonically gratifying, and I don’t get that on a compressed digital line. So that’s one answer. Nostalgia can be orienting, but it’s indulgent to think that you can live in the past. If it’s just purely mournful, what does that help?

The second thing I want to flag is this: There’s been a lot of chatter about friction lately, like, “We need to reintroduce friction,” and I think that’s also wrong. 

Everything got really smooth and slippery. It literally did, because we all got these smartphones and they’re slick on their surface. But then, because of efficiency and ease, everything started to feel really frictionless, and the opposite of frictionlessness is friction. 

But you don’t really want things to be hard or to stand in your way. You just want the experience of feeling yourself doing them, which is quite a bit different from “Oh, that should be hard, I need to introduce obstacles that get in my way.”

I also wanted to ask about this question of the relationship between the small stuff in the book’s title and these bigger questions of how society is changing. I agree that our lives have become dematerialized and separated from sensory experience, but it sounds like you’re not worried that at some point, the islands of physical or sensory pleasure or gratification are just going to disappear, or become vanishingly small.

I think it’s a really subtle, complicated matter. Yes, that’s what I’m saying, but we seem to believe it’s not the case somehow. We’re obsessed with the idea that something has been lost that cannot be recovered, or that needs to be recovered through massive cultural, social, economic, regulatory, whatever kind of change. 

Now, I’m not against that kind of big thing. I don’t know how easy or likely it is to be accomplished. I think it’s a lot to put on ordinary people to say, “Well, we just need to solve wealth inequality or capitalism, and then we’ll be able to get back to experiencing our lives fully.” We can’t wait for that. Ordinary people don’t need to wait for that.

I would very much like it if the leaders of industry and of government and of civic organizations did what they could, in their contexts, to build more small stuff-oriented, more gratifying opportunities for people.

An example is the whole discourse about remote work, office work, what it is that you’re doing every day at your email job or whatever. Clearly, if you run an organization, you have some control over what people are actually doing and how.

But my neighbors, they don’t get to make that choice, your aunt doesn’t get to make that choice, but they still have to live in their sensory lives, there’s something they can do right now, in this moment, every day, rather than wring their hands or post obsessively on Facebook about how shitty everything is. We’ve tried that for a while, and it doesn’t seem to have helped.